Olga Bubich

“These conversations in bed, as they lay exhausted by sex,
were an alternative sort of lovemaking, even a more exquisite one.
They didn’t require any flirting, tactical manoeuvres or courtship,
just the opening of a sort of floodgate inside himself;
it was like unblocking a dam and letting the words pour out.
And those words already knew what to do,
what sentences to form, what stories to create.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“Who am I kidding?

I should drop this act of "nothing is about me". I am writng to you also because I need a home. And, as disarming as it may be, my only chance to build it is with words and to do it with you. Let me go further. I need to be able to tell you who I am now. I need to find out how to speak of the self without the fear of appearing as the proud of victim of the glorious survivor.... [...] After being unhomed, a stranger learns that home is not a question of what she remembers but who remembers her. I need you to remember me. I need you to hear me so that I too am audible to myself. I need to know not necessarily where I will go next but with whom.”
― Ece Temelkuran, Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century

“I wasn't Christian enough.
I wasn't Hindu enough.
I wasn't communist enough.
I wasn't enough.

It came as a relief. It liberated me and set me walking. For years after that I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I travelled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-writer,

Free woman, Free writing. Like Mother Mary taught me.

I hadn't just avoided the gilded cage. I had blown it to smthereens.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“My beautiful student was last to present her work.

She said to think of a truth in nature is absurd. The birds, the flowers, the trees, the soil - each of these entities had a history that preceded its current state, and each stage of that history was informed by both regeneration and violence, and political and environmental factors that impacted it directly and indirectly. If there was any truth to be discovered, it was that nature itself was not neutral, and any so-called purity was imposed upon it by those of us with the need to use nature as a shield from our own complicity with systems of destruction.”
― Makenna Goodman, Helen of Nowhere